Blog Comments & Posts

Imitation is underappreciated in today’s business world (and, as we'll later see, in SEO). For example, did you know that:
- Coca Cola imitated RC Cola in replicating its diet cola product
- Visa and Mastercard imitated the credit card concept from Diners Club
- McDonalds took the fast food chain concept from White Castle
T...

I was implying on Rand's post that a page that is on position 1 will get natural links. I commented on that and said that you don't get a bunch of natural links for being #1 for a particular phrase for 3-4 months, for example. To put it into proportion, try doing nothing and after #1 for a competitive phrase for 3 months while someone is building links actively for those 3 months. That guy is going to outrank you in no time. The 'network' effect of being in the search engines (and I don't count factors like followers etc) for a long time is not a big one if you ask me. So that blue person might not be running down a slope so fast.

On your comment that "network makes a content great and fetch natural links and nothing else" I agree, yes, network makes content great in the search engines DIRECTLY, but on the other hand content can BUILD YOU a network . So content can also get natural links indirectly. I don't know what you meant by 'makes a content great' did you mean content in the eyes of the search engines or content overall? We should't leave content out of the whole link equation.

"To make an entry into an over saturated market you need to grad a considerable market share at the expense of well established players" - I don't agree here, you don't have to grab a market share from a competitor if you wanna be in that space. Say you're in the market whose job-to-be-done is 'I want to buy gifts for a close person I love'. Now, you make some cool gift and sell it...and people buy it. Yes, some will buy your gift and not your competitor's but many may buy them both. Or someone might not consider buying a gift (he didn't find a suitable one from competitors) till he found yours. So you aren't really *only* stealing market share when you introduce a new product in a particular market because people wants are unlimited. It isn't just"I'll either buy this or that" but "I'll buy this AND that" or I'll buy that because I never wanted to buy this. People wants are not limited.

First, let's use your examples, you assume there will be enough demand for the 'gifts for dogs' or 'gifts for cats' category. How do you know there will be enough people interested in that niche so you have a decent ROI? How do you know the market will be rising so future competitors will have problems to catch up? There are SO many variables in this and as I'll later explore, this is a very simplistic way to look at what market you want to enter. I think this is a very wrong way of seeing things. I see problems in Rand's post, yes, being #1 in search results will result in you getting natural links, but at WHAT PACE? I have 2-3 #1 rankings for keywords with 100-150k searches and I barely get 4-6 natural links (the content is top notch by the way, it's not that my content sucks). My place can be easily taken by a competitor who goes and does a massive guest posting campaign for 3 months, for example. So I think the important question to ask here is: AT WHAT PACE do your competitors grow naturally? Things are getting worse as time passes for you vs. your main competitor, but that 'worse' might be at a very small pace. In my niche, competitors are getting links naturally yes, but they're lazy because they got success and they got it for a long time so it will be easy for me to catch up & stat ahead and not repeat the mistake of getting lazy because of success.

I adopted a different way of looking at 'niches', I now don't think there are 'niches' or 'niche markets' but products that people 'hire' to do a particular job. For example, in the "gifts market" as you say it, one "job" people are trying to do is "I want a gift for me son's birthday", for example. Or "I want a gift for my mom's birthday". Now, it's hard to identify these segments if you thoughts of the gifts market as 'gifts for humans vs animals' view.

I also think the advice of 'don't get into over-saturated market' is very simplistic. What if the 'gifts for dogs' market was worth 1/1000 of the 'gifts for humans' market? And now suppose, if you spent the same time in the 'gifts for humans' market as you spent in the 'gifts for dogs' market, you could capture 1/100th of that market. You'll be making 1000% more. I don't know why but for some reason I find that when I enter extremely competitive markets I always make money. Unlike entering those niche market. Who knows, maybe it's because most people are scared of competing with the big guys ?

Just wanted to mention one more thing:Instead of EzineArticles you can use other big article directories like ArticlesBase or even try eHow (their job is to pump out content every day so they're doing some decent research for the articles :) )

I think incentigves play a very important role here, for example, Seomoz gives opportunity for a free membership for people with 150+ mozpoints, and the more useful the comment is, the more thumbs up it will get = moz points. Good incentive for people to leave helpful comments.

Rand is an SEO professional. SEO is his full time job, actually TEACHING and providing SEO tools is his job. So all of these resources can potentially help him.

What about us, the people who are trying to get more traffic from Google? Will SEOBook, for example, really help us (that guy criticizes almost everything)? No treally.

Same with SEJ and some other blogs. There are some useful ones like SEOByTheSea (I am a big believer that if the best way in the long run to make something work is to first learn how it actually works...which is a bit common sense but not many people embrace it).

My friend wrote that article on 'I listened to Google and I failed', glad to see many people link to it from seomoz :D

Your graph presents two extremes. My friend was on the first extreme and he realized that doesn't work. But fortunately he didn't go to the other extreme which was to buy links..he still continued to build great content + did increase the manual link building process significantly for domain and page authority.